Robert Smith never aimed to create the definitive soundtrack for our current dystopian moment, but he may have done it anyway. The argument against? He wrote some of these songs more than a decade ago and has been playing them off and on at shows for nearly as long. But despite the temporal disjunction, if you’re looking for some way through early November 2024, bleak, magisterial Songs of a Lost World makes an ideal companion. It is wise, spiritually charged and not at all bent on insisting that “we’ll get through this” or “things will get better.”
Category: The Cure
The Cure :: Charlotte Sometimes (Soundcheck, 1982)
The bootleg live version of “Charlotte Sometimes” from The Cure’s soundcheck at The Hammersmith Odeon could be considered the definitive version of the song. It’s a perfect concoction of composition and environment, adding an additional ghostly layer to an already haunting song. The lo-fi recording quality and cavernous reverb from the empty venue perfectly plays into the song’s eerie nature. It’s as if The Cure are performing to an audience of phantoms beneath the dim lights of an abandoned theater – is there a better way to hear The Cure than that?
The Cure :: Carnage Visors (Film, 1981)
Released in 1981, the 28 minute instrumental piece “Carnage Visors” was originally conceived as the score to filmmaker Ric Gallup’s (brother of the Cure’s Simon Gallup) animated short of the same name. The piece was used in lieu of an opening band during the Cure’s 1981 tour in support of the group’s Faith lp. The film has since disappeared, the only known copies belonging to Robert Smith, Gallup, and the Cure’s Lol Tolhurst.
The Cure: Apeldoorn, Netherlands 1980
Captured while on tour mid-summer in Europe, we find a nascent, if not potent, form of the group — one both informed by and contributing to the conversation of post-punk. Touring in support of their recently released Seventeen Seconds lp, this was the Cure in transition, having recently augmented its core with the addition of Simon Gallup (bass) and Matthieu Hartley (synths). Whereas the group’s sound, and presentation, would soon morph and evolve, this VHS rip finds them perfectly suspended in Dutch time. […]